Sunday, April 28, 2013

Like last week’s painting of Seoul, this etching was done in
anticipation of seeing the real thing – back when we lived in Dubai, and getting
to Syria seemed pretty straightforward. Somehow, it never quite worked out, and
the closest I got to Palmyra was a brief
stopover in the Damascus airport on my way to Jordan.Since returning to Canada
I’ve missed a couple of chances to go back to the Middle East on university Travel
Study Programs… and now, of course, going to Syria isn’t straightforward at all!

Sunday, April 21, 2013

I am on the art tours committee, a volunteer fundraising group at the Art Gallery of
Greater Victoria, planning and organizing day-trips
up-island or to Vancouver, trips of four or five days duration further afield to, say,
Alberta or Ontario, and really big tours every year or two to such places as the
Hermitage in St. Petersburg or Cambodia, Laos, and Viet Nam in S.E. Asia.

This year’s really big one, scheduled for November, was to
go to South Korea and Japan, lead by
the Gallery’s Curator of Asian Arts, Barry Till.Then North Korea found its way into the
headlines every day for about three weeks, and some of the people who had said
they were interested in participating started stalling or even backing out.So about a week ago we pulled the plug on the
South Korean portion of the tour.

At
approximately the same minute, North
Korea disappeared from the news… Purely coincidence, of course, but I like to
think we’ve contributed our bit to reducing tension in the world.

I’m disappointed we’ve had to make this decision (I
think I’m the only one) as I was planning to join the tour, and I’d done some Google
Image research on the painting possibilities in South Korea – mostly the
temples, museums and gardens we were going to visit, but including a few cityscapes
as well.This painting of Seoul is a compilation of a few of them.

Sunday, April 7, 2013

I may have given you the impression I find Lake Louise
somewhat less magical than Lake
O’Hara in my blog post a
few days ago. Let me explain.

Part of the allure of Lake
O’Hara is simply that it’s so hard to
get to – the much more famous wonder of Lake Louise
is easily accessible, and most of the millions of visitors to western Canada make
a point to seeing it.

The hiking and
walking trails around and above the lake are never actually crowded, just
because there is so much lakeshore and mountainside to accommodate them… but
the parking lots are at least as bad as any shopping centre I’ve ever seen. There’s often entertainment as well, such as the Canadian Army Cadet pipe band
that happened to be there the day we visited in 1996. And another thing... the north face of the glaciers visible from Lake Louise is much thicker than the ice on the other side of the mountain

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

In 1916, the American artist John Singer Sargent famously
painted Lake O’Hara from this spot, since known as
Sargent’s Point.It
continues to be a favourite location for painters almost one hundred years later.

From here you can see one of the most perfect settings inthe Rockies – the other side of Mount Victoria and Mount
Lefroy which form the backdrop for Lake Louise.
In a way, Lake O’Hara
is the mirror image of Lake Louise… except it
is much smaller, about 1000 feet higher, and a much deeper green.

About Me

Charlene Brown is a Canadian painter who started writing about painting trips during the ten years she and her husband lived in Dubai. The Gulf Weekly began publishing her accounts of painting trips in that part of the Arabian peninsula -- then said they might consider other countries, even such exotic locations as Canada! She had written about painting trips in over twenty countries by the time her husband retired and they returned to Canada to live.